Mozilla to introduce sponsored content in upcoming Firefox

Firefox users in the USA could soon see ads in the form of sponsored links to websites that appear in new browser tabs. The browser maker revealed in January that Firefox beta users would start to see "an occasional sponsored story" in the Pocket recommendations section of new tabs.

The feature was shown to a "small portion of US users" initially but with Firefox 60, scheduled for general release on May 9, it will go "fully live" for US users.

Pocket is the popular web-clipping service that lets users save all manner of content from the internet to read or watch later across multiple devices. Mozilla had supported Pocket natively for a while anyway, but last February Mozilla went all-in by buying Pocket outright.

For those, who are concerned about privacy, Mozilla promises that "all personalisation happens at the client side" - this means that your data is kept on your computer, not uploaded. It also adds that as Firefox is entirely open source, you can look under the bonnet and see exactly what data is or isn't collected.

"Neither Mozilla nor Pocket receives a copy of your browser history," Pocket's FAQ section reads. "The entire process of sorting and filtering which stories you should see happens locally in your copy of Firefox."